(Banned Book Weeks Banner. Click image for larger version. Click here for photo credit)
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
~Helen Keller
I have no idea what has happened thus far this year, but I’ve been a reading fool. I’ve read almost my annual average already. I have not done anything consciously to increase my reading time, it just seems to be happening. The month of May was the most prolific month I’ve had. Granted, I read a number of very short books, and listened to one on audio, but the length of the books overall has not varied widely from the mix of what I normally read.
That was a rhetorical question. I know that the answer is a resounding “Yes!!!”
On this date, at 8:11 p.m., EIGHTEEN years ago, our daughter Tori entered the world. Eighteen years?!?!
Who would have thought time would pass so quickly? A little over a week ago we got together with family and friends to celebrate her graduation from high school. And now she is turning that age which society has deemed to be the beginning of adulthood. Hard to believe that the little tiny baby I held in my arms–what was it, yesterday?–can now vote!
This past Saturday evening the combination of anticipation for the Kansas City Science Fiction and Fantasy Society’s Conquest 41 coupled with the sounds of my daughter and her boyfriend playing Lego Star Wars on the Playstation 2 reminded me that I hadn’t indulged in any celebration of the 30th Anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back. I wasn’t about to let May get away without my own personal acknowledgment of a series, and most especially a film, that has had such a profound effect on me.
I quickly visited the basement library to bring up a few goodies to help me celebrate, one being the Roger Kastel autographed print of my favorite piece of Star Wars art, the post image for The Empire Strikes Back. This was a lovely surprise gift given to me a few years ago by Deslily.
Over the next 24 hours I would re-read a beloved Star Wars novel, watch The Empire Strikes Back, and travel back in time down a road littered with memories so palpable that they could have happened yesterday.
Oskar Schell, the primary narrator of Jonathan Safron Foer’s award-winning novel, is not a normal nine-year-old boy. He is intelligent to the point of being precocious, he is constantly using his imagination to concoct wild inventions, and he idolizes Stephen Hawkings. Oskar Schell is also a boy in great pain–his father died in the World Trade Center two years before the events of this story. His adventures begin when he discovers an envelope with the word ‘Black’ written on it, hidden in a vase in his father’s closet. Within that envelope is a key that does not fit any of the locks in the Schell home. Realizing that this is possibly a clue left by his father, Oskar sets out to find the lock that fits this mysterious key.
Time, as it always does, has rushed on, and our annual May trip to the rolling hills and lush green valleys of eastern Missouri’s wine country has come and gone. It was a wonderful, restful vacation despite a few less than ideal circumstances. One of these being the fact that I got some kind of intestinal bug on Tuesday, the day we left, that brought with it a two-day fever and off-again, on-again stomach cramps that didn’t go away until Saturday morning. The other was a week-long rainy forecast.
Don’t feel bad for me though, we really did have a relaxing and refreshing time together. I didn’t get any pictures to share this time, just the mental ones I took of the beautiful green countryside that we drove through each day on our outings. We did a lot of exploring, and a lot of reading. I decided to let this post serve as an “I’ve returned” message followed by some mini-reviews of the books I managed to get through over the course of this past week.
